Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Motorola)

Motorola is launching even more midrange phones. The $499 Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) and the $399 Moto G 5G (2022) are both coming to the US in the next few weeks. Don't confuse today's $499 "Moto G Stylus 5G (2022)" with the $299 "Moto G Stylus (2022)"; the "non-5G" version was just announced in February and is not being replaced.

The $499 Moto G Stylus 5G is doing some work to differentiate itself, with a 120 Hz, 6.8-inch, 2460×1080 LCD as the main attraction. Just like the $282 OnePlus Nord N20, Motorola's phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 SoC. This is a 6 nm chip with two 2.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A78 cores, six 1.7 GHz Cortex-A55 cores, and an Adreno 619 GPU. The Moto G Stylus 5G also has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 5000 mAh battery.

The Moto G Stylus 5G comes in this lovely seafoam color. (credit: Motorola)

The Moto G Stylus 5G also has an NFC chip. No other midrange Motorola phones include NFC, so users are locked out of tap-and-pay functionality. This is one of the biggest problems with Motorola's current midrange phone line.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Congressional Quarterly)

The Food and Drug Administration is considering holding off on reviewing Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine for children under age 5 until it has data from Pfizer and BioNTech on their vaccine for young children. The plan would push back the earliest possible authorization for a vaccine in the age group from May to June—yet another blow to parents who are anxious to protect their young children as the rest of the country ditches pandemic precautions, despite recent upticks in cases.

The FDA's plan to delay the review was first reported by Politico Thursday morning, with sources telling the outlet that FDA officials worry about green-lighting Moderna's vaccine, only to find out just a few weeks later that Pfizer's offers superior protection.

In an interview with CNN's Kasie Hunt later in the day Thursday, top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci confirmed that the regulator is considering waiting until summer, likely June, to authorize vaccines for kids under 5. Fauci said the delay was intended to avoid confusion about the vaccines, but he emphasized that he was not involved in the regulators' decisions and couldn't explain their thinking further.

Enlarge / Microsoft is disabling SMB1 in newer Windows 11 Home builds. (credit: Microsoft)

Most Windows 11 preview builds focus on adding features, but sometimes Microsoft uses them to remove things. Users installing the latest Windows 11 Home Insider builds will find that support for version 1.0 of the venerable SMB file-sharing protocol is now disabled by default, something that may break file-sharing for older networked storage equipment. A post by Microsoft program manager Ned Pyle details the reasoning behind the change and how it will affect users.

Microsoft had already disabled SMB1 by default in other editions of Windows. The SMB1 server service was removed from all Windows versions starting in 2017, and the client service was disabled in Windows 10 Pro editions starting in 2018. Lyle writes that the client in the Home editions of Windows came last since it will "cause consumer pain among folks who are still running very old equipment, a group that's the least likely to understand why their new Windows 11 laptop can't connect to their old networked hard drive."

SMB1 has long since been replaced with newer and more secure versions of the protocol; SMB2 was introduced in 2007, and version 3.1.1 was added to Windows 10 in 2016. But the original is still occasionally used by old servers and equipment—and if a machine is old enough to rely on SMB1, it's probably old enough that no one is interested in maintaining or upgrading it.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson)

Earth Day is April 22nd, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we can boost their sustainability and minimize their climate impact.

The term "restomod" first started gaining traction back in the 1990s. As muscle car enthusiasts searched for ways to improve the performance and reliability of their vintage machines, a cottage industry of folks adapting late-model powertrain and chassis components soon began to emerge. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find a restored late-'60s Mustang or Camaro on the road that hasn't been modified with some kind of modern tech—be it a computer-controlled fuel injection system, an updated brake and suspension system, or even a modern V8 engine.

To some, that might be sacrilege. To others, it's simply about getting with the times.